WIES holds nearly 6000 images of rubbings of watermarks in incunabula printed in Spain. Thanks to the hospitality of the Austrian Kommission für Schrift-und Buchwesen des Mittelalters, Dr Alois Haidinger, it has become possible to present this sample selected from 9100 rubbings of watermarks in copies of more than 900 editions out of the total of 1000 printed in fifteenth-century Spain.

The research was started in 2000 and more than 100 libraries have been visited, mainly in Spain but also in the USA (New York Hispanic Society and others), London, Munich, Paris, St Petersburg, Vienna, Portugal, Belgium, The Netherlands and elsewhere.

In this provisional presentation − started in January 2007 with 2800 records − the images are arranged not by watermark motif but by bibliographical number, mostly by IBE (Catalogo general de incunables en Bibliotecas Españolas) or HBI (Haebler, Bibliografia Iberica) and some other bibliographical reference works including BMC X and Goff.

All watermarks occurring in the investigated editions have been scanned.

Folder1: images of the whole A5 format sheets with library, fol.nr, mL(mark left), mR (mark right), numbering of the chainlines from the left or the right side of the incunable sheet.

Folder2: zoomed-in rubbings with bibliographical reference plus two-digit number for the watermark in the edition and a ruler with cm scale.

Author, title, imprint and other short-title data can be found in the printed reference books (HBI, IBE etc.) but also in the international database of incunables of the British Library: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc .

In September 2008 the Council of the Bibliographical Society, London, has approved support for completion of the database of watermarks in Spanish incunables: WIES. As a first result of this, 3100 scans were made at Multiscan, a firm based on the Dutch former island Urk, to be added to the 2800 presented already in 2007.

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, the National Library of the Netherlands, will make available the software from WILC and provide facilities for keyboarding into the database.
WIES is already related to the European-funded Bernstein project, The Memory of Papers:
http://www.bernstein.oeaw.ac.at